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Successful Goal Setting in Network Marketing

by Kevin on August 8, 2012

image courtesy FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We have all heard ideas about setting goals and achieving them. There is a lot of literature in the self-help genre about visualizing your goals and the power of your thoughts. Some might even tell you that if you put together a dream board of pictures of things you hope for or if you simply think about an outcome, it will happen.

Does that mean if you think of being the top performer in your company and have pictures on a wall of the dream trip to an exotic location and the mansion on the hill that all this will come to reality? Possibly because if, on the other hand, you tell yourself that you won’t or can’t achieve your goals, you will be 100% correct, and they won’t happen. By telling yourself that they will happen you give yourself the start of a fighting chance as long as you then take the next step and head into action.

Where a lot of the self-help books out there have stopped short is that they oftentimes either gloss over or completely ignore the hard work that has to be done in order to get to your goals.

I truly believe that we were created with the ability to go after the things we desire provided that we have the discipline of action, patience, and perseverance to go along with the belief that we can attain the goals.

Tips for Setting Goals

Break Them Down Into Smaller Goals – Time and time again, I have watched people dream big and then take no action because they somehow felt their goal was unattainable. Don’t let the size of a goal be the cause of inaction or procrastination.

Break up your goals into smaller goals. Basically you have to go from where you are to where you want to go. That gap, on its own, can be actually seem scary. With setting smaller goals along the way, you break that bigger gap into smaller bite size pieces.

It is like eating a slice of pizza. If your goal was to eat the slice, you would not put the whole slice in your mouth at once (without making yourself sick). You would take smaller bites until you finished eating that slice of pizza. Whether eating a slice of pizza or setting a goal of a promotion, there are smaller steps to take that are much easier to make than the larger goal on its own.

Visualize the Outcome and Steps Required – Going back to the self-help genre, there is a lot of discussion about visualizing the outcome. This is also great. It helps keep you targeted on where you want to go.

To take the next step that many of the self-help books miss, you would visualize the things you need to do to get achieve you desired outcome. If your goal was to win a gold medal at the Olympics in swimming, you would visualize yourself not just on the podium listening to the national anthem but also working hard in the pool at practice and overtime consistently shaving seconds off of your time.

You would even visualize yourself making smoother and more powerful strokes in the water. You would visualize yourself getting better and better knowing it is all about constant improvement. Michael Phelps was not born a gold medalist. He earned his way there with hard work.

Write Down Your Goals – There is a saying that without writing down your goals, they are simply the dreams of the awake. By writing our goals down, we have something that we can review and use to remind ourselves of the path that we have set out on.

When times get tough (and they will), your written down goals can give you a sense of clarity and purpose through whatever fog is happening in your life. Also, you can decide if you need to adjust your path to get to your goals.

Make Them Challenging – Your goals should be realistic but at the same time they should not be defeating. The danger in being “realistic” is that we sometimes use it as an excuse to hide our true potential because we do not want to set ourselves up for disappointment. Sadly being realistic can be an excuse to lower the level of our goals than what we are actually capable of achieving.

To better illustrate what I am saying, if your goal is to be one of the top income earners in your company in 90 days, this might not be realistic unless you are pretty close to that point. The unrealistic part would be the time frame of achieving the goal so quickly (remember there is no real get rich quick scheme) because it may just take more time.

Getting to be a top performer in your company might feel like an uphill battle, but the beauty is you get to decide if achieving the goal of getting there is realistic. Whether or not being a top performer/earner is achievable is up to you with consistent performance, hard work, and personal development over time. Every company has top performers. Why can’t you be one of them be you?